Why Mac OS X Is Unsuitable For Web Development

Hugh Pickens writes "Ted Dziuba has an interesting and amusing post on how he made a big mistake when he was offered a choice for his company laptop. His options were a Lenovo Thinkpad or a MacBook Pro, and he picked the Mac, thinking it would be closer to what he was used to. So what's wrong with using the Mac as a development machine for Milo, a Python application backed by PostgreSQL and Redis? 'I've only poked around a little, but so far I've found three separate package managers for OS X: Fink, MacPorts & Homebrew,' writes Dziuba, adding that when you are older, you will understand the value of automated version dependency satisfaction. Next is that your development platform should be as close as possible to your production platform, but 'OS X and Linux have different kernels, which means different I/O & process schedulers, different file systems, and a whole host of other implementation details that you'll write off as having been abstracted away until you have your first serious encounter with "It Works On My Machine.'" Finally, he says, Textmate sucks. 'Sooner or later, you have to face facts. Man up and learn Emacs.'"

Comments

There's nothing wrong with development on the Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

...unless you expect it to let you do Linux development.

Of course, you can dual-boot Linux on it or run it in VMWare. But you knew that, right?

Package management

[jbolden]

Lets just quote a line from the article:

I've only poked around a little, but so far I've found three separate package managers for OS X: Fink, MacPorts & Homebrew. Each is heinous in its own special way, but the fact that you have three competing package managers, that don't talk to each other has convinced me that Mac users, in the typical hipster fashion, brutally raped the Unix culture, throwing away everything that made it unique because they did not understand it.

Lets see:
Fink is based on Debian's apt system
Macports is a typical BSD style port system
Homebrew is not designed as a package management system but to allow installs of individual applications easily.

And this one:

I realize that if you're a Mac web developer, your deployments probably consist of ssh and git pull, but when you are older, you will understand the value of automated version dependency satisfaction. Better not tell you now, it would spoil the surprise.

Of course the point of all 3 of them is dependency resolution.

One of the unfortunate trends in OS X package management is the idea that the user should be compiling everything. This is being perpetrated mostly by the Homebrew package manager, whose basic building block is the formula, basically a Ruby script that tells it how to download, compile, and install the package. Well congratulations, dipshit, you've reinvented dpkg, poorly. I am simply trying to develop an application, is there a good reason why I am compiling libxml2 and all of its dependencies? What is this shit, Gentoo?

Gentoo of course originally was trying to bring a BSD style ports system to Linux, as an alternative to the integrated .apt, .rpm culture. So it seems to me this guy might want to understand package system on Linux before he comments further.

Re:Who the fuck is Ted Dziuba?

[Draek]

Angry much? ;)

Besides, my point was clear: you can run Windows on any damn hardware you feel like as long as it meets its technological requirements, and the same goes for Linux, FreeBSD, FreeDOS, Minix, and pretty much every OS I can think of, even freakin' Android. Only exception? Apple's "thou shalt only use thy copy on thy Apple-branded computer" OSX.

Now go back whence you came, angry troll, and trouble our threads no more.